OLD HACK.(The Talk of the Town)(how a former taxi driver obtained a book contract)

Publication: The New Yorker

Publication Date: 26-JAN-04

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COPYRIGHT 2004 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.

Robert Miller, who is the president of Hyperion Books, had to get to a meeting, so he waved at a cab on Columbus Avenue. "The cab stopped," Miller said later. "It really just stopped for a red light, but I thought maybe it had stopped for me. I don't know why I thought that, because if you looked at it you realized it was not a current cab." Indeed, the cab was a Checker, a transportation species that became officially extinct in New York in 1999, when its last medallion-bearing representative went out of service.

The one that stopped for Miller belonged to Bobby Lowich, who retired from cab driving in 1997, primarily so that he could spend his time...

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